by Lee Hill
The seventies should have been a continuation of the Terry Southern boom that started in 1964. Instead, as the new decade began, Southern entered a frustrating and puzzling twenty-five-year stretch of grand projects, fascinating possibilities, and dead ends. The great mystery surrounding Southern’s postsixties career is why he had such difficulty getting work into production. There are no simple answers, but various contradictory theories that shed light on Southern’s sudden fall from the A-list have been proposed. Some say it was because of Terry’s fondness for drinking and recreational drugs, but this does not seem to have adversely affected the hard-living New Hollywood crowd. Almost everyone in that gang was experimenting with cocaine and nobody batted an eye at an exec or director rolling a joint. Some pointed to a “graylisting” of Southern because of his left-wing political activism, but he still got commissions. Still others argue that his brand of satire had fallen out of fashion, but the vibrancy of American and international film culture in the seventies had room for all kinds of sensibilities.
Southern’s lousy business sense was a big part of the problem—forgetting to sign urgent papers forwarded by his agent or lawyer, spending and lending money at a jaw-dropping rate, and generally not caring what was a good career move and what wasn’t. As a collaborator, Southern became increasingly associated with extreme personalities and marginal figures that gave studio execs pause. He also clung perversely to a bohemian ethos formed in the cafés of Paris that held that one should never try too hard to achieve success. Of course, the irony was that Southern had achieved success beyond his dreams and had no idea how to cope with it.
The grand good times of the sixties were ending. Southern was finding it harder to mix business with pleasure. The projects he now embarked on were tainted by the kind of plain dumb bad luck that gives new meaning to the term “development hell.”
For starters, the IRS was now aggressively pursuing taxes owed since 1966. By late 1970, the taxman garnished Terry and Gail with a vengeance. When friends like Ellen Adler came to visit them in East Canaan, it was obvious that the Hollywood gravy train had run out. Beneath Terry’s expansive greetings and Gail’s gracious hospitality, there was sadness, uncertainty, and desperation. Terry, the perennial fringe player, had briefly been in sync with the zeitgeist, but the tax problems had derailed his confidence. Career management wasn’t his forte at the best of times, but the pressure from the IRS to pay up stymied him.
“[Terry] didn’t know how to take care of himself. He didn’t know how to have a home and…he was like an orphan,” Adler remembers. “I went up there once and it was like seeing people in an orphanage…. I think when you really get poor it really becomes impossible to see after things. The trees were falling and apple trees were on the ground. The grass was long. And I said to Terry, ‘What is this The Cherry Orchard, for God’s sake?’ Then, you couldn’t get hold of him. You had to call some bar in Canaan and he was dogged by that and poverty, but he didn’t talk about that.”
As a struggling student and writer in Paris, Southern had kept body and soul together by borrowing from friends. Now, as a celebrity in decline, he responded in much the same way to the financial stress. He asked friends about jobs and wondered if so-and-so wouldn’t mind advancing a thou or so? Few turned Terry down. After all, they reasoned, as friends went, he gave great value. Nobody ever felt bad after a few hours spent riffing with Terry Southern.
These were humbling times. Many of the friends whom Terry used to hang with in the Village or on the Left Bank were now financially secure. They had managed to transform their various pursuits into careers.
“There was this ‘embourgoisement’ and this turning of everybody into people of enormous wealth,” Adler continues. “I don’t know how that happens. Larry [Rivers] got very wealthy. [Terry] used to joke about Larry all the time…. He would say, ‘Larry took me to the safe to look at his money.’ But all of his friends and even Carol got substantially wealthy…everybody husbanded the money and took care. Terry was like this counterbohemian who is still twenty years old. He had tremendously fancy tastes. He would go out and order the best brandy…he loved the idea of very fine things and cars.”
Adler tried to help out by renting Southern her station wagon, but he neglected to take over the insurance. “I got word that I had lost my license for a year and I really got mad at [Terry]. He didn’t know how to cope with somebody mad at him. He didn’t know what to do. Of course, he sent all kinds of presents, all kinds of letters, but he needed the station wagon above all. He put money into it. It was something or other. It was a loan, so I got mad at him. Then not having seen him…he used to come [to Adler’s Manhattan home] and he and Gail would sleep on my couch quite often.”
During 1971, Southern’s writing revolved around projects like God Is Love, DJ, based on Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam?, Hand-Painted Hearts, based on a story by Thomas Baum, a not-too-promising young-kids-in-the-publishing-world script, and Drift with Tony Goodstone. All of these projects were highly speculative and the collaborators were not exactly household names. Goodstone, for example, was primarily known as the author of a book on the history of the pulp magazines. Southern was making a couple of thousand on each job at the most.
DJ was at least a paying pig. Mailer had granted the option on his novel to an English documentary filmmaker Dick Fontaine, who had filmed his mayoralty campaign and march on the Pentagon, for a dollar. Fontaine raised some seed money to hire and pay Southern; he had written a draft and showed it to Southern, who was curious.
“Terry was drinking a lot at the time,” recalls Fontaine, who wasn’t crazy about Southern’s script—although it did begin promisingly with a mock-Western shoot-out between the narrator and an Indian.
Mailer’s novel was an update of William Faulkner’s The Bear put through a Burroughsian blender of scatological language. Working out his father-son relationship on a corporate hunt in Alaska, DJ, the Holden-Caulfield-on-acid narrator, can’t help but see the excursion as a metaphor for the racial, political, and generational meltdown of the sixties. DJ was the kind of seemingly unfilmable project that appealed to Terry. There was a lot of latitude for exploring ribald dialogue and extreme situations.
Fontaine’s documentary work was moving away from the cinema verité style of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker toward the kind of film essay Godard and Chris Marker were known for. Fontaine had just made a film in this style called Double Pisces in London, which opened at the New York Film Festival in September 1970. Terry’s buddy Robert Brownjohn (who would die from to much high living in 1970) appeared as a Grand Guy figure visiting a slaughterhouse with Amanda Lear, the future Roxy Music cover girl. Later in the film, Fontaine wards off a bailiff hoping to collect alimony from his ex-wife and then visits his mother in the Home Counties. The film concludes with Fontaine loading up a Sten gun on the roof of his boarding school in a none too discreet homage to If… by Lindsay Anderson. Fontaine had started making the film with a cooperative, but took over the reins when their constant indecision and bickering became tiresome. As a document of the disenchantment with the elusive promise of the sixties, Double Pisces remains fascinating. Presumably, Fontaine would have injected a similar tone of fragmentation and self-reflexiveness if the Mailer adaptation had gotten off the ground. Despite Fontaine’s persistent search for funding, there were no takers.
God Is Love was a Buñuel-like treatment focusing on Maria, a peasant woman in her thirties who discovers she has miraculous powers when she makes love. Through her “ministrations,” she is able to cure the sick, the crippled, etc. No one remembers who prompted Southern to turn out the treatment.
In a desperate gesture to get back on the A-list, Southern dashed off a note to Stanley Kubrick, who was editing A Clockwork Orange in England. That was a project he knew he should have been working on. After all, he brought the book to Big Stan’s attention when MGM decided not to back the director’s costly Napoleon project, but there was no point harboring a g
rudge. Kubrick’s response—that he was open to any ideas Terry might have—was friendly but noncommittal.
The post-Strangelove relationship between Kubrick and Southern was fertile ground for rumors. There were those who believed that Kubrick was angry at having to share profit participation in A Clockwork Orange with Si Litvinoff and Max Raab. These Southern associates had bought the rights to Burgess’s novel in 1966, forcing Kubrick to cut them in on the profits. Southern believed Kubrick thought he had let Litvinoff and Raab steal the director’s lead. The other theory was that Kubrick continued to bear a grudge against his Strangelove collaborator for receiving all the credit for the script. A less sensational and more plausible reason why the director and writer didn’t work together was that Kubrick hated to repeat himself. Like an Olympic athlete, Kubrick wanted to surpass the achievements of the previous film. In striving to make each film a radical departure from the last, Kubrick constantly sought out new collaborators.
“With each new film, you sort of marry new people. Stanley is often accused of having done this to a fault,” said Christiane Kubrick. “He did it no more or no less than than anybody else…. Stanley always said, ‘With each new film I get a real education. It’s like another college I can attend.’ He would read up on subjects and buy books and hang out with a new gang. He was not being malicious when he dived into another pool. That was just his process.”
As with Stanley Kubrick, if Southern felt that Hopper had let him down over Easy Rider, he didn’t let it show. During 1970, Hopper, Fonda, and Jack Nicholson rode a wave of publicity and acclaim. In interviews, they diminished the importance of the screenplay and highlighted the importance of improvisation as a key to the success of the film. Neither Hopper nor Fonda seemed eager to share their unexpected Easy Rider profits with the man whose participation helped seal their deal with Columbia. Aside from a letter to the New York Times in June 1970 regarding Nicholson’s alleged improvisation of the UFO speech, Southern was publicly silent about getting the shaft creditwise. To the puzzlement of more business-savvy friends, Southern remained friendly with Hopper and Fonda.
Fonda and Hopper followed up their Easy Rider success with two solo efforts: The Hired Hand, a neo-Western heavy on atmosphere but short on narrative drive; and the appropriately titled The Last Movie. Underwritten by Universal, The Last Movie began as a promising script by Stewart Stern, the screenwriter behind Rebel Without a Cause, but ended up as a fascinating mess of improvisation and sub-Brechtian ideas about breaking the fourth wall between the viewer and the screen. On location in the Andes, with a cast and crew with little to do except party, Hopper had tossed out Stern’s script in search of his own elusive vision.
To everyone’s surprise, The Last Movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Universal loathed the film and gave it a token New York release. Eventually Hopper bought the film back in order to screen it to more appreciative audiences at film festivals and cinémathèques. The Last Movie did succeed in capturing the kind of exhaustion and rootlessness that began to typify the late sixties and early seventies. However, it ultimately lacked the discipline, ambition, and formal rigor of films like Two-Lane Blacktop, Performance, or even Easy Rider.
Southern and Hopper met up in New York in the fall of 1970 shortly after The Last Movie wrapped. Fred McDarrah took a picture of the two looking shaggy but amiable in the jeans and long-hair look that was all the rage in the New Hollywood. It was a look that didn’t suit either of the men very well. Southern had a drink in his hand.
As the IRS began garnishing Southern’s income, he retreated closer to home. During the summer months, it had become the custom for Terry and Gail to visit friends in the Hamptons. During one of countless visits to Larry Rivers’s home in Southampton, a curious script called It’s the Little Things That Count began to evolve. Its flippant title disguised its seriousness; it was a straightforward study of how the rumor of child abuse affects the reputation of a painter and his son in a small town. It went no further than a treatment.
In December 1971 Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was released in New York. It was endlessly compared and contrasted with Sam Peckinpah’s contemporary look at violence in an English village, Straw Dogs, released the same month. Kubrick had written the shooting script himself and encouraged the cast, especially Malcolm McDowell, to embellish their roles through improvisation. The film employed an episodic structure. It divided audiences upon its release. Time’s Jay Cocks hailed Kubrick as America’s “most audacious filmmaker” but felt A Clockwork Orange, in spite of its wit and irony, lacked “a sense of grief or of rage, and finally a portion of humanity.” Pauline Kael called both Kubrick and Peckinpah’s films fascist. The controversy over violence simply boosted the film’s box office. It received several Oscar nominations including one for Best Picture.
A Clockwork Orange’s success was a mixed blessing for Kubrick. The good news was that the film cemented the beginning of a very fruitful and open-ended arrangement with Warner Bros. that would last until his death. However, the film inspired a few copycat crimes in England and public outrage over concerns of violence. Sensitive to possible threats to his family, Kubrick withdrew the film from distribution in the U.K. (The Kubrick estate finally gave the go-ahead for Warners to reissue the film in England in March 2000 just over a year after his death.) The other major fly in the ointment was that a significant portion of the film’s profits was now going to Si Litvinoff and Max Raab.
The year 1972 began with Southern’s official divorce from Carol. One of the nastier effects of Terry’s tax problems was that the IRS seized a recent inheritance from her father. After considerable hard work, she began to move up from the ranks of reader and became an editor at Crown Publishers. She married Newsday film critic Alexander Keneas, who later died of cancer. Eventually Carol became a publishing executive and was able to buy a weekend house on Long Island. While Carol raised Nile, Southern continued to visit or had Nile stay with him in Connecticut on weekends. Despite his stubborn refusal to manage his finances more responsibly, he continued to make sure that Nile was well cared for. Some of his book royalties went into a fund for Nile’s education.
Despite his growing reputation for hell-raising, Southern was concerned not only about his son’s material welfare, but about his cultural development. He would tell Nile that the best job in the world was that of a film director, and to prove this began making Super-8 films with Nile.
“We started to make these great—now I would call them hallucino-generic—films,” recalls Nile. “These cross-genre films. Terry talks about making an ‘A-Dult Western,’ a horror Western art film. He had me playing Lar, Larry Rivers, I knew that as a name, and I was a portrait painter. There was this character called Mr. Weird. It was called Night of Terror, Day of Weird. I did the titles. We had made this drum spit that would be the rolling three-dimensional credits. I made this papier-mâché distorted head and it would say Monstro Films Limited. And I would film that with this weird lighting. There would be these scenes of a portrait painter who is painting someone weird who is wearing a mask. Mr. Weird, who is played by my dad, is very agitated all the time. “During these playful shoots,” Nile continues, “Terry would quote Peter Sellers and say, ‘The way into the character is the voice.’ Even though the films were all silent. He’s a tremendous actor on-screen. He really is fantastic on-screen. Even though these were silent films, he uses the Voice like Peter Sellers used to say…. He would do these mannerisms as Mr. Weird or whoever he was. We had found this crude portrait of someone wearing a suit at a tag sale and picked it up. Cut to a cue card: ‘Say, you’ve been at it for quite a long time. Just what kind of painter are you anyway?’ I look at the work and I look at him and I say, ‘Well, nonrepresentational!’ and he comes over and looks at the painting and does a double take. He’s wearing a mask and takes out this huge knife and stabs the painting, which bleeds all over the place like a Tarkovsky film. We had this great slow-motion Kodachrome red paint [and] he was
blasting it with this baster. And he does this great pratfall where he is running in the snow, looking back and running, falling on his face, and then keeps getting up to run.”
Back in 1965, over borscht at the Russian Tea Room, Maggie Paley had asked Terry what book he would most like to film. Without hesitation, he said Naked Lunch.
Since 1969, two friends of William Burroughs had been a in a flurry of activity about adapting Naked Lunch. Antony Balch, a London film distributor and underground filmmaker, would direct and Brion Gysin would write and design the film. At the end of the day, their efforts amounted to little more than a pile of intriguing four-color storyboards, the kind of thing that would make a wonderful coffee-table book. Then Chuck Barris, the mercurial producer of such TV shows as The Dating Game, took out an option on Naked Lunch and sent Southern and Burroughs first-class plane tickets to talk story at his Bel-Air mansion. The two literary outlaws were picked up by a chauffeur-driven Daimler at the airport and taken to their audience with Barris.